Technical support engineers and engineering groups often require detailed computer network topology information to understand, triage and resolve technical support issues. In some cases, topology diagrams already exist, but are not focused on relevant devices or relevant subsystems in these devices that are critical to understanding the technical issue. These diagrams may also lack crucial detail and the type of detail required can vary, depending on the technical support issues reported. Creating detailed, pinpoint topology diagrams is time consuming and requires lengthy back and forth discussions between customers and technical support. If accurate topologies are not created when a trouble ticket is first raised, with tech support, valuable time is lost in resolving technical issues and relevant data may be lost, as well.
Even when the topology is known, obtaining timely information from the relevant elements is also very difficult. Numerous CLI (command line interface) commands must be provided to relevant device. Remembering that many events are highly transitory, the many manual CLI commands decreases the ability to have the proper information available to perform any analysis, thus providing a further obstacle to analysis of a problem.